From Link Building Guide

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Large Scale Link Prospecting Process

For link builders without access to custom scraping and crawling tools we recommend the following link prospecting process.

Setup...

• Set SEO for FireFox settings to display PageRank, DMOZ status, and Yahoo! Backlinks
• Set a 5 second delay for each setting in SEO for FireFox to prevent banning by the search engines...it also doesn't hurt to be polite.
• Set your Google search preferences to display 100 results.

Get Top Ranking URLs

1. For each keyword...
   1. Search Google
   2. Wait until DMOZ, Pagerank, and Y! Backlinks are acquired for each of the top 100 results.
   3. Click the "CSV" link at the top of the web page, underneath the Google search box, to export all results.
2. Aggregate each keyword report into a single spreadsheet. (These is your "competitor list".)
3. Sort the final spreadsheet by PageRank, then by Yahoo! Backlink totals, then by DMOZ status.
4. Manually review URLs, from top to bottom, to determine if the page is from a competitor or complimentary website. Prospect backlinks from the competitor URLs most relevant to your website.

Aggregate Top Backlink Opportunities

1. For each URL identified above, export the backlinks with Yahoo!
2. Aggregate all of the backlink URLs, similar to the CSV files above.
3. Here, you will have duplicates. Remove all duplicates to create a final list of Link Prospect URLs.

Create a Prioritized List of Link Prospects

1. Copy URLs from the Link Prospect URLs list, 100 at a time, and paste them into a bulk PageRank checker.
2. Once the PageRank has been calculated for each URL, copy the URL and PageRank back into the Link Prospect URLs list
3. With the final Link Prospect URLs list, sort it by PageRank.
4. Repeat this process for other link opportunity qualifiers you believe may impact your goals.

Manually Review URLs

1. From top to bottom, go through each URL in the Link Prospect URLs list.
2. On each URL determine if it is a viable link opportunity. If so, denote it in a third column in your spreadsheet.

Note: We usually find that URLs with a PageRank of 3-5 are the ones most open to giving a link back to your website. If you are looking to be effective with as little time invested as possible, we suggest quickly skimming URLs that have a PageRank of 6 or greater, and PageRank of 2 or lower. Spend the most time with PageRank 3-5 URLs.

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Large Scale Link Building | Analyzing URL Link Value